It’s important to first develop the short and long term goals of what you hope to accomplish with the CMMS, such as inventory control, maintenance labor and material cost tracking, generating PMs, and planning and scheduling maintenance activities.
It’s also vital to determine how the CMMS system will interface with your enterprise resource systems or accounting system. The integration of your CMMS and back office systems will necessitate answering the following questions:
• How soon does that need to happen?
• Did you intend to use tablets or smartphones and how soon does this need to happen?
• Did you want your CMMS to generate and track purchase orders, and if so, how soon?
Form an implementation team and appoint a project manager. The project manager must commit the majority of his or her time to the effort – you can’t just add it to their existing responsibilities. Make sure they are knowledgeable about maintenance processes, which can be a common failure point with many implementation projects.
